Literature and exhibited

Lot Essay

‘The apparent distortion of the figure invites comparison with Francis Bacon. Bacon’s lying figures, however, always occupy an artificial stage which seems to have been coldly painted as an arena within which the act of painting is performed. Auerbach treats the space, the bed and the figure with an equal intensity ... Figure on a Bed is calm and ordered with the expressionist appearance external only’
(C. Wiggins, ‘Frank Auerbach’, in Artscribe, no. 22, April 1980).

‘I had my hands up over my head. I did that for hours. And I was so happy. You see I had this terrific excitement when I was going. I loved getting up at 5.And I tore down those dark streets’
(J. Yardley Mills, quoted in C. Lampert, ‘Auerbach and his Sitters’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, p. 26).

‘The freedom and comparative wildness of his mature style, whose main point (apart from a deepened role for expressive colour) was to get the whole surface moving under the action of drawing, the decisive linear marks of the brush in liquid paint’
(R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 180).

‘We had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him and he was very fond of me ... there was no sort of romance but we were close. Real friends’
(J. Yardley Mills, quoted in C. Lampert, ‘Auerbach and his Sitters’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, p. 26).

‘[These works mark] a change in Auerbach’s facture which had been on its way since the middle of the 60s and became pervasive by the end – the complete absorption of drawing into the painterly stroke, so that the form of a head or body, instead of growing by accretion into a solid mass, was improvised, laced together by its graphic energy. The paint is still thick but no longer crusty, and the part of Auerbach’s now clarified colour is to evoke its lost mass’
(R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 165).

Luxuriant swathes of molten impasto are swept across the surface of Frank Auerbach’s Figure on a Bed, progressively stacked in horizontal bands before coalescing into an elegant abstraction of a female nude. Painted in 1968, it belongs to a series of works that depicts one of his most significant muses, Julia Yardley Mills (‘J.Y.M.’), reclining upon a bed. Created largely between 1966 and 1970, these works are situated at an important turning point in Auerbach’s practice. Having recently signed a contract with the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, the artist was able to purchase high-quality coloured pigments for the first time. The works from this period, including his North London landscapes of Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill, were suddenly saturated by a new palette of brilliant green, turquoise, red and canary yellow. In contrast with the thick, encrusted ridges of paint that had defined his earlier canvases, Auerbach began to develop a more fluid linear style, freely dispersing his medium with energetic brushstrokes and, at times, his own hands. With its subject exquisitely conjured as if through a single gestural flourish, Figure on a Bed is radically different in style from his earlier depictions of Estella West (E.O.W.) in a similar state of repose. According to Robert Hughes, Auerbach’s paintings of Yardley Mills accelerated ‘the freedom and comparative wildness of his mature style, whose main point (apart from a deepened role for expressive colour) was to get the whole surface moving under the action of drawing, the decisive linear marks of the brush in liquid paint’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 180). A similar work from the series – Figure on a Bed, 1967-70 – is held in the collection of Tate, London, where the artist’s major retrospective is due to arrive from the Kunstmuseum Bonn this October.

Auerbach first met Yardley Mills when she was a professional model at Sidcup College of Art in 1956. ‘Jimmie’ – as she was affectionately known – was the first person to be painted in Auerbach’s Camden studio, and subsequently sat for him almost every Wednesday and Saturday for the next four decades. According to Catherine Lampert, she was ‘a force of nature, adaptable, optimistic and uncomplaining’ (C. Lampert, ‘Auerbach and his Sitters’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, p. 26). In the present work, and the others from the series, Auerbach depicts her in a twisted, elongated repose. ‘I had my hands up over my head. I did that for hours. And I was so happy. You see I had this terrific excitement when I was going. I loved getting up at 5. And I tore down those dark streets’ (J. Yardley Mills, quoted in C. Lampert, ‘Auerbach and his Sitters’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, p. 26). Over the following years, she would feature in a distinguished seriesof full-length portraits and sumptuously rendered heads, including Head of J.Y.M. (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), Head of J.Y.M. III, 1980 (British Council) and J.Y.M. Seated No. 1, 1981 (Tate, London) She loved modelling, but in particular she relished the opportunity to witness the artist’s creative development first-hand. ‘I didn’t care what I looked like; I just wanted to get the rhythm and the excitement’, she recalls (J. Yardley Mills, taped conversation, Peckham, January 2001).

With its abstract planar divisions and graceful linear economy, Figure on a Bed is imbued with a sense of sublime ordered grandeur that belies its gestural surface. As Colin Wiggins has claimed of this particular group of paintings, ‘The apparent distortion of the figure invites comparison with Francis Bacon. Bacon’s lying figures, however, always occupy an artificial stage which seems to have been coldly painted as an arena within which the act of painting is performed. Auerbach treats the space, the bed and the figure with an equal intensity ... Figure on a Bed is calm and ordered with the expressionist appearance external only’ (C. Wiggins, ‘Frank Auerbach’, in Artscribe, no. 22, April 1980). For Hughes, Auerbach’s thick slabs of colour – reminiscent of Nicolas de Staël’s trowel-like application of paint – create the impression of a glowing altar upon which the figure is raised. This reverential quality, he writes, is ‘reinforced by the pale pillar-like form that the studio stove has become – but also its countervailing sensuous presence, displaced into the paint itself. Each stroke of the brush seems to have its particular weight and clarity, a direct outlet of feeling into substance, mark by decisive mark, the specificity of the touch grounded in the long-meditated concreteness of J.Y.M.’s presence in the artist’s life, and in his occupation of this particular room. And yet in its sudden eloquence and brightness of colour the image feels like an apparition, a thing “materialized” whole and entire, all at once’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 165).

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